Nixon Is 80 (And Elvis Joins Party)

By JAMES BARRON

Published: January 10, 1993

He listened through the static as off-key well-wishers sang "Happy Birthday" over the phone from California. Later he dug into his favorite dinner, pot roast, and posed for a photograph with his four grandchildren. Wearing a good Republican cloth, uh, suit.

Former President Richard M. Nixon turned 80 yesterday. Now, it is possible to say this about that: his philosophy on birthdays is unsentimental ("Don't look at the past, look to the future," he said yesterday, "because if you do, you may live long enough to enjoy it.") Having survived "Six Crises" and now eight decades (three since he promised that the press would not have him to kick around anymore and nearly two since he resigned the Presidency), he celebrated. Double Celebration

"I hated the idea of becoming 80 years of age until I thought of the alternative," he said.

Actually, the celebration was bicoastal: Mr. Nixon had birthday cake (eight candles) with his wife, Pat; his daughters, Julie Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox, and their husbands and children at his townhouse condominium in Park Ridge, N.J.

And there were big doings at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif., starting with one of those too-good-to-be-true tie-ins. Officials of the library noticed that Friday was Elvis Presley's birthday.

No Elvis sightings were reported in Yorba Linda yesterday, and no Nixon sightings were reported at Presley's mansion, Graceland, in Memphis. But hundreds of visitors at the Nixon Library posed with life-size photo cutouts of Presley and the former President. They ooohed and ahhhed as they filed past a display of the wood-handled revolver and the silver bullets that the King gave the President in 1970, when Mr. Nixon made Presley an honorary special agent in the war on drugs.

And after their rendition of "Happy Birthday" the crowd listened as the voice heard on the Watergate tapes was piped over loudspeakers to say thanks for celebrating.

His office said Friday that he would not be giving interviews, but he was quoted by The Associated Press as saying he walks three miles a day, feels terrific and watches sports and the prime-time mystery show "Murder, She Wrote" on television. 'Who's Nixon?'

They couldn't help falling in love, but it was hard to tell with whom, Elvis or Mr. Nixon. "Who's Nixon?" asked 40-year-old Shirley Bowman of Lake Forest, Calif., who bought a $45 watch with a picture of Mr. Nixon and Presley on its face.

Her husband, Dennis, said he was the Nixon fan in the family. "He was the best in international diplomacy," Mr. Bowman said. "He is respected by world leaders."

Mr. Nixon was said to have been amused by the Elvis connection. "He said to me, 'Elvis was quite a guy,' " Roger Stone, a former Nixon aide, recalled Friday. " 'He was shy, hiding his shyness behind his flamboyant behavior.' " In 'the Eagle's Nest'

Mr. Nixon now spends his days in what his wife is said to call "the eagle's nest," the paneled library on the third floor of the townhouse. Last year he plowed through "Orwell" by Michael Shelden and "Woodrow Wilson" by August Heckscher, along with Goethe ("probably the only man of his time who never had a child by Madame de Stael," he was quoted as saying) and de Gaulle and Churchill.

Over the years, as the public memory of Watergate and the resignation has faded, he has become a kind of elder statesman. Last year he presided over a dinner for President Bush, sponsored by the Nixon Library. This was shortly after he wrote a much-publicized memo criticizing Mr. Bush's post-cold-car policy toward the former Soviet Union as "pathetically inadequate." Last year was also 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and the beginning of what Mr. Nixon's successor, Gerald R. Ford, called "our long national nightmare."

Yesterday was the end of a busy week at the Nixon Library. At 7 A.M. on Friday, three hours before the doors opened for the day, 300 people were in line to get in, and the phones were so busy that some callers had to be put on hold. While waiting, the callers heard marches: "Seventy-six Trombones" and (could this be?) "The Washington Post." (No, just a similar-sounding segue to another Sousa favorite, "Stars and Stripes Forever.")

The lines were long yesterday as well, but the first 250 visitors were rewarded with slices of a birthday cake inscribed, "R.N. January 9, 1913 -- January 9, 1993. Eighty years of making a difference for peace and freedom in the world."

"In my lifetime, I believed President Nixon was the best President we ever had," said Gina Scoggins, a housewife from Tustin, Calif. But she added: "There's no one like Elvis."